US elections in the eyes of a Tanzanian analyst

On Tuesday, November 8, Americans will vote for their next president in their 55th presidential elections___ the first one was held in 1789, about 43 years before Said bin Sultan moved his capital from Muscat to Zanzibar.

The two major political outfits -- the Democratic Party and the Republican Party -- have respectively nominated former Secretary of State (and former Senator of New York and former First Lady) Hillary Clinton and businessman and popular cultural personality Donald Trump.

President Barack Obama, America’s first African American president is ineligible to run because United States presidents are limited to only two terms as it is in our country -- Tanzania.

The American presidential electoral system is unlike ours although in crucial respect___ Americans do not directly elect their President. The 50 states from Alabama to Utah have “electors” who vote for the most popular candidate within their states, with the exception of two states, whose exceptionalism do not qualitatively change the election outcome.

These electors are apportioned across the states equal to the number of members of Congress___ their bicameral Bunge___ they are entitled to which in turn is dictated by their share of the country’s population given their most recent census.

The District of Columbia (D.C.), which straddles the country’s capital and seat of its executive, legislative, and judiciary branches (or famously the White House, Congress, and the Supreme Court), is given electors equal to those given to the smallest state, which is currently Delaware’s three electors.

These electors collectively constitute what is known as the Electoral College. This year because Congress consists of 435 members from the House of Representatives and 100 Senators (2 from each of the 50 states) plus the 3 given to D.C. the Electoral College totals 538 and the winner for the Presidency must win a majority or 270 of these electoral votes.

If we were to be voting this way our Electoral College would have 269 electoral votes because of the 264 Members of Parliament plus the 5 from the Zanzibar House of Representatives who are elected from constituencies and each Region of the country would be apportioned the electoral college votes based on the total MPs it sends to Bunge. Dar es Salaam and Mwanza would loom large while smaller regions such as Kusini Unguja and Katavi would receive the smallest electoral votes.

California, New York, Texas, and Florida are the Dar es Salaam, Mwanza, and Mbeya regions of the US because they are large populous states and thus get the largest electoral votes with 55, 29, 38, and 29, respectively.

California and New York, however large they may be, aren’t where the presidential elections are typically decided because in recent elections the former has reliably voted Democrat and the latter reliably voted Republican. Florida and Ohio (20 electoral votes) are among the places where the elections are more competitive and are typically called “battled ground” or “swing” states.

In the 2000 election, for instance, incumbent Vice President Al Gore lost to George W. Bush because of losing the popular vote in Florida by a razor thin 537 votes! These votes allowed Bush to get Florida’s then-25 electoral votes and secure a total of 271 Electoral College votes against Gore’s 266. Gore contested these results all the way to the Supreme Court which ruled 5 against 4 to accept the Florida results and the rest, as they say it, is history.

Now, in this year’s election the race seems to be between two very unpopular candidates. Only about 43 per cent view Clinton favourably, according to Gallup, for instance. Donald Trump’s approval rating isn’t that far off at an average of 38 per cent across several opinion polls. It is an historic election of course because if elected Clinton will be the first woman President and Trump the oldest candidate to assume the office.

Both candidates have been plagued by scandals___ Clinton because of using a private email server to conduct government, and thus potentially sensitive classified, business during her stint heading the State Department (their Ministry of Foreign Affairs) while Trump has been quoted making racist, Islamophobic, anti-immigrant, and most recently deeply disturbing sexist remarks against women.

The political campaigning is unique this year also because of the absence of a substantive discussion of policy issues and instead a discussion about the personalities of the two major candidates. There has been discussion on Bill Clinton’s infidelities and Hillary’s complicit behaviour toward the women who have accused her husband of sexual harassment or abuse.

There has also been discussion about Trump’s amiable ties with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and that country’s cyber-attacks on various American political figures and institutions that has led to the leaking of damning emails for the Clinton campaign through WikiLeaks. Recently, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Director James Comey announced a re-opening of investigations into Clinton’s email scandal that has caused the polls to tighten and made Trump more competitive nationally.

Nate Silver, the founder of FiveThirtyEight.com that excels in opinion poll analysis, still predicts a Clinton victory giving her a 71.2 per cent chance of winning at the time of this writing. There are, however, crucial states that Clinton needs more solid footing going into November 8 that her former boss, Obama carried in 2008 and 2012. Although Clinton has a 0.3 percentage point lead in Florida, Trump is edging her by 1.4 percentage points in Ohio.

This is not good news for Clinton because Ohio has voted with the eventual winning candidate for a majority of US elections and consecutively in the last 13 presidential elections since the 1964 election. Now, Clinton can still win a majority of votes in the Electoral College without winning Ohio but losing the state leaves her fewer roads to winning the crucial 270 Electoral College votes.

So who will win the elections? It seems very unlikely that Trump will win and my money is on Clinton winning the election as do the political betting markets on PredictIt.org who have her at an average of 69 per cent chance of winning.

Not that it matters for me or my fellow compatriots because no matter who takes over the Whites House for the next 4 years from Obama, I suspect American foreign policy will remain largely unchanged when it comes to US-Tanzania relations.

I recently attended the Annual Coca-Cola World Fund Lecture at Yale University which this year was delivered by the esteemed Ugandan political scientist Mahmood Mamdani___ who once taught at the University of Dar es Salaam overlapping slightly with Walter Rodney in what must have been an exciting time to be either a student or faculty at our most prestigious academic institution.

Mamdani, among some of the many insightful things he said during his lecture, noted that American foreign policy with regard to South Sudan and Sudan did not change much with Obama taking over from Bush in 2008, which drew inquisitive questions form the audience.

So I doubt it will change when Barack leaves the 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue residence. Having said that, however, let us all hope Hillary wins, not just because I believe she may be slightly more beneficial to Tanzania, but also because it would mark a great end to Barack’s tenure as that nation’s first Luo American president to have to pass the baton to that nation’s first woman president.

Mr Manda is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science at Yale University focusing on the political economy of development. He can be reached via e-mail [email protected], Twitter @msisiri and Instagram @msisirimanda.